Bjorn Poonen
| Bjorn Poonen | |
|---|---|
| File:Bjorn Poonen.jpg | |
| Born | c. 1968 (age 55–56) Boston, Massachusetts |
| Nationality |  United States |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley Harvard University |
| Doctoral advisor | Kenneth Alan Ribet |
| Notable awards | Chauvenet Prize (2011) |
Bjorn Mikhail Poonen is a mathematician, four-time Putnam Competition winner and currently the Claude Shannon Professor of Mathematics at MIT.[1] His research is primarily in number theory and algebraic geometry, but he has occasionally published in other subjects such as probability[2] and computer science.[3] He has edited two books,[4][5] and his research articles have been cited by approximately 500 distinct authors.[6] He is the founding managing editor of the journal Algebra & Number Theory,[7] and serves also on the editorial boards of Involve[8] and the A K Peters Research Notes in Mathematics book series.[9]
Contents
Education
Poonen is a 1985 alumnus of Winchester High School in Winchester, Massachusetts. In 1989, Poonen graduated from Harvard with an A.B. in Mathematics and Physics, summa cum laude. He then studied under Kenneth Alan Ribet at the University of California, Berkeley, completing a Ph.D. there in 1994.[10]
Academic positions
Poonen held postdoctoral positions at MSRI and Princeton University and served on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley from 1997 to 2008, before moving to MIT.[9] He has also held visiting positions at the Isaac Newton Institute (1998 and 2005), the Université Paris-Sud (2001), Harvard University (2007), and MIT (2007).[9]
Major honors and awards
- Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, 2012.[11]
- American Academy of Arts and Sciences: elected in 2012[12]
- Chauvenet Prize: the 2011 winner, for his article "Undecidability in number theory"[13]
- David and Lucile Packard Fellowship[14]
- Sloan Research Fellowship[15]
- William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition: winner in 1985, 1986, 1987, and 1988 (the only other four-time winners since 1938 are Don Coppersmith, Arthur Rubin, Ravi D. Vakil, Gabriel Carroll, Reid W. Barton, Daniel Kane and Brian R. Lawrence).[16]
- International Mathematical Olympiad: silver medalist in 1985.[17]
- American High School Mathematics Examination: only participant (out of 380,000) to receive a perfect score in 1985.[18]
Trivia
- He co-authored a paper entitled "How to spread rumors fast".[19]
- His Erdős-Bacon number is 3: he co-authored scholarly articles with Andrew Granville,[20] Wen-Ch'ing Winnie Li,[21] Andrew Odlyzko,[22] and Peter Winkler,[23] all of whom have Erdős number 1;[24] and he appeared in the documentary Julia Robinson and Hilbert's Tenth Problem[25] narrated by Danica McKellar, who has Bacon number 2.[26]
- Poonen proposed the Big Mouth Conjecture in April 2014, proving it minutes later during a faculty talent show at MIT. [27]
References
- ↑ MIT Mathematics Faculty
- ↑ Amir Dembo, Qi-Man Shao, Bjorn Poonen, and Ofer Zeitouni, "Random polynomials with few or no real zeros", J. Amer. Math. Soc. 15 (2002), 857-892.
- ↑ Bjorn Poonen, "The worst case in Shellsort and related algorithms", J. Algorithms 15 (1993), 101-124.
- ↑ Kiran Kedlaya, Bjorn Poonen, and Ravi Vakil, The William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition 1985-2000: Problems, Solutions, and Commentary, Math. Assoc. of America, 2002.
- ↑ Bjorn Poonen and Yuri Tschinkel (eds.), Arithmetic of Higher-Dimensional Algebraic Varieties, Progress in Math. 226, Birkhäuser Verlag, 2004.
- ↑ MathSciNet author citations
- ↑ Algebra & Number Theory
- ↑ Involve (mathematics journal)
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 Curriculum vitae, retrieved 2015-01-28.
- ↑ Bjorn Poonen at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- ↑ List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society, retrieved 2013-05-26.
- ↑ American Academy of Arts and Sciences members
- ↑ Chauvenet Prize
- ↑ Packard fellows in mathematics
- ↑ Notices Amer. Math. Soc. 45, no. 6, (June–July 1998), p. 723.
- ↑ Putnam competition results
- ↑ International Mathematical Olympiad results
- ↑ American High School Mathematics Examination results, page 31
- ↑ C. Kenneth Fan, Bjorn Poonen, and George Poonen, "How to spread rumors fast", Mathematics Magazine 70 (1997), 40-46.
- ↑ Brian Conrey, Andrew Granville, Bjorn Poonen, and Kannan Soundararajan, "Zeros of Fekete polynomials", Ann. Inst. Fourier (Grenoble) 50 (2000), no. 3, 865--889.
- ↑ A. R. Calderbank, Wen-Ch'ing Winnie Li, and Bjorn Poonen, A 2-adic approach to the analysis of cyclic codes, IEEE Trans. Inform. Th. 43 (1997), 1-11.
- ↑ Andrew Odlyzko and Bjorn Poonen, Zeros of polynomials with 0,1 coefficients, L'Enseign. Math 39 (1993), 317-348.
- ↑ E. G. Coffman, Jr., Bjorn Poonen, and Peter Winkler, Packing random intervals, Prob. Theory Relat. Fields 102 (1995), 105--121.
- ↑ The Erdős number project
- ↑ Julia Robinson and Hilbert's Tenth Problem
- ↑ The Oracle of Bacon at Virginia
- ↑ Poonen, [1]
External links
- Pages with broken file links
- 1968 births
- Living people
- 20th-century American mathematicians
- 21st-century American mathematicians
- Algebraic geometers
- Number theorists
- Harvard University alumni
- University of California, Berkeley alumni
- Paris-Sud 11 University faculty
- Putnam Fellows
- People from Winchester, Massachusetts
- Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
- Guggenheim Fellows
- International Mathematical Olympiad participants
![[1]](http://lestat.mit.edu/poonen.jpg){kind=link}